Entwined

Sometimes game demos, like movie trailers, make their subjects look a lot better than they really are.

Introduced with some fanfare at Sony’s E3 press conference earlier this month, Entwined dazzled an auditorium of more than a thousand gamers with its gorgeous looks, soothing music, and curious play mechanics, which require players to control two separate flying entities simultaneously via a pair of thumbsticks.

Sadly, playing it makes it feel more like a technical demonstration or a school project than a full-fledged game – which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising since Pixelopus, the studio that made it, was founded by a group of former game design students.

It strives for and comes close to achieving the simplicity of play and ethereal beauty of a game like Flower, but lacks that game’s intricacy, depth, and emotional underpinning.

Entwined is about a blue bird and an orange fish.

Soaring through a series of short, minutes-long lifetimes – represented as colourful, kaleidoscopic tunnels – these two souls want nothing more than to be united.

But their worlds – represented by the left- and right-hand sides of the tunnel – don’t overlap. They’re together in a sense, gliding side-by-side. But they cannot touch, cannot become one.

Thus, they fly alongside one another, racing through blips of energy and coloured gates in an effort to earn the strength and ability to unite. And, after flying through enough orbs and gates, they eventually do. You’ll see them transform into a lovely, multicoloured bird, and go for a quick aerial jaunt around lakes and cliffs and clouds before being reborn in a new life to start the struggle anew.

You’ll do this nine times over the course of about an hour and the game will be over, save for a handful of side challenges.

It’s not at all an unpleasant experience. Let’s be clear on that. The peaceful music – which players add to with each gate and orb they pass through – is calming. The flowing, colourful visuals are hypnotic. It almost feels like meditation.

But, much like meditation, it’s also a bit dull and repetitive.

Guiding these two creatures on their journey through the tunnel via the controller’s two thumbsticks is a neat idea, and enjoyable to start. But it never evolves. It gets a bit more challenging as the gates change shape, start to move, and become staggered, but there’s little more to it than that. A gradual steepening of difficulty is all you have to look forward to.

More problematic is that the game has seemingly little to say about much of anything outside of putting forward a slightly juvenile notion of two creatures obsessed with being united as one. Love, it’s always seemed to this happily married man, is more about the sharing of distinct and interesting lives, not the physical, unification of two souls into a single entity. That just seems unhealthy.

It’s worth noting that integrating ambidextrous control within meaningful narrative has been done before, most recently in last year’s Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. That game linked the act of controlling two characters at once with the events of its story in a deeply moving manner. The method of control became a vital part of the message. It was heart-wrenching in its genius.

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